10 reasons to check out the Morepath web framework in 2015

Happy new year everybody! Last year we've made a lot of progress on the Morepath web framework for Python. It will go quite a lot further in 2015 as well. Here are 10 reasons why you should check out Morepath this year:

1. Knows about HTTP status codes. When you write a "Hello World" application it does not matter that there are other status codes besides 200 OK, but in real world applications you want your application to know about 404 Not Found, and 405 Method Not Allowed, and so on.

   Morepath does not make you write write verbose and failure-prone special cased code to handle status codes. Instead, Morepath does HTTP status codes correctly right away.

2. Morepath makes hyperlinks to objects. In a typical routing web framework, to make a URL, you need to remember the name of a route, the parameters that go into the route, and how to get that information from the object to which you are making the route. This leads to duplicated code and hardcodes route names everywhere. Since it does so little, it encourages you to skip it entirely and write even more hardcoded URL generation code everywhere.

   Morepath makes it easier to do the right thing. Morepath lets you link to Python objects. Morepath also understands URL parameters can be part of URLs too, and can create a link with them in there for you too.

3. Built-in permission system. Morepath does not leave something as important as security entirely up to extensions. The core framework knows that views can be guarded with permissions. Who has what permission for what object is then up to you, and Morepath lets you define permissions powerfully and succinctly.

4. Compose applications. If you have a project application and a wiki application, you can mount the wiki application into the project applications. You can develop and test applications independently, and then combine them later. These are true coarse-grained components. This way, Morepath lets build large applications out of smaller ones.

5. All views are reusable. Morepath does not have a separate sub-framework to let you write more reusable and generic views than the normal ones. Instead any view you create in Morepath is already reusable. And remember - you don't have to hardcode route names, which makes views more generic by default.

   Views in Morepath are true fine-grained reusable components, without extra work. Morepath gives you the tools to build a generic UI. You can reuse views with ease with Morepath.

6. Subclass applications. Morepath does not have a separate sub-framework to let you write reusable blueprints for applications. Instead, any application you create in Morepath is already reusable in that way. In the real world, applications evolve into frameworks all the time, and Morepath does not stand in your way with special cases.

   You can subclass any Morepath app to add new routes and views, or override existing ones.

7. Made for the modern web. Many modern web applications feature a REST backend with a rich, client-side frontend written in JavaScript. Morepath is written to support REST from the ground up - it's not a layer over something else, but it's not a constraining HTTP API generation tool either.

8. Extensible framework. Morepath lets you extend the web framework in the same way it lets you extend applications written in it. You can write new Morepath directives and framework applications. As examples, more.static adds advanced browser static resource handling to Morepath, more.transaction integrates Morepath with transaction based databases such as SQLAlchemy and the ZODB, and more.forwarded adds HTTP Forwarded header support.

9. Micro framework with macro ambitions. Morepath is a micro framework; it's not a lot of code. It's easy to get an overview of what's going on, and it's easy to embed in a larger application. Morepath packs a lot more punch in a small amount of code than your typical Python micro web framework.

   All this does not come at the cost of performance. When the primary selling point of a Python web framework seems to be performance, perhaps it's not doing enough for you. But Morepath has more than adequate performance - on "Hello world" at least Morepath outpaces some very popular web Python frameworks comfortably.

10. Documentation. Some Python micro frameworks also have micro documentation. Instead, Morepath has lots of docs.

Enjoy 2015!